“If you’re the New York Jets, you’ve got to sit there and go, ‘Wow, good thing we made a move last year and we didn’t wait until this year.’ My first thought is just physically and how he played at the end of the year, I would be pretty happy going, ‘Man, all right, we got a guy.’ I think if Geno Smith was in this draft class, he would be the number one guy, without question.”

Without question. Reminder: A lot of this draft-projection stuff is guesswork, even for those folks who get paid a ton of money by NFL teams to try to guess correctly.

Look, for those of you rolling your eyes and scoffing, keep in mind that a number of mock drafts—like this one and this one and this one—had Smith pegged as a top-10 pick around this time last year. Not quite how things turned out, huh?

Simms may turn out to be right, and he may turn out to be wrong. But his opinion is exactly the sort of pin-the-tail-on-the-prospect punditry that keeps the NFL machine humming smoothly for a solid 12 months a year. There's no penalty for being wrong, and there's no prize at the bottom of the box for being right. Having a strong take—any kind of strong take, the stronger the better—is all that matters.

When draft day finally rolled around, Smith fell to No. 39. A lot of dumb things were said about him. He was thrust into a starting job right away. He had no receivers. He turned it over a ton.

He eventually finished strong. And the consensus—even among the Jets' brass—is that he's still an unfinished product. Which is still more than can be said for Manziel, Bridgewater, and Bortles, who—let's remember—have yet to play in an NFL game.